Effort aims at halting high-tech brain drain

By Anthony ClarkBusiness editor

Saturday

May 30, 2015 at 10:30 PM

For Gainesville company Fracture, a shortage of local Web developers who are able to fill the high-pressure demands of a startup company.

For Gainesville company Fracture, a shortage of local Web developers who are able to fill the high-pressure demands of a startup company has been the biggest roadblock to the company’s growth, according to co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Alex Theodore.

Fracture is not alone. According to Theodore and other executives, a growing number of local startups, as well as more established tech companies and nontech companies that need people with computer programming and development skills, are pulling from a limited pool of talent in Gainesville.

Meanwhile, many University of Florida computer science graduates leave to find work in Silicon Valley or other tech hubs around the nation.

Startups with limited resources face additional challenges in having to train new graduates who don’t have the practical work experience to meet their specific needs in a work environment that relies heavily on each employee to survive and thrive.

Business and education leaders are working to address gaps in both the number and job-readiness of available workers for an industry deemed vital to growing the local economy and creating jobs.

Last year, the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce created the Gainesville Technology Council, made up of executives from 13 tech companies, in part to address those issues after targeting information technology as one of five industries with the most potential for creating local jobs to focus its economic development efforts.

As evidence of the industry’s potential, a council survey of 23 companies representing 70 percent of the 1,666 local workers in software and information technology companies showed that 21 of the companies planned to expand in the next three years, investing $230 million in payroll, equipment and facilities and creating 1,100 new jobs, according to Susan Davenport, Chamber vice president of economic development.

The workforce region consisting of Alachua and Bradford counties consistently has over 140 openings in information technology, according to Makaya McKnight, STEM Ready program manager for CareerSource North Central Florida.

Gainesville is not the only area facing a shortage of workers with computer skills.

A White House report this spring said that half a million jobs were unfilled in information technology, the largest portion of the 5 million open jobs at 12 percent, with salaries 50 percent higher than the average private-sector job. Two-thirds of the IT openings were in non-IT industries.

“Every tech hub in the country is having these issues,” Davenport said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the number of computer occupations in the U.S. will grow 18 percent between 2012 and 2022 — from 3.7 million to 4.3 million jobs — compared to 11 percent for all occupations.

Every projection shows a severe shortage of workers in computer science, according to Juan Gilbert, chairman of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department at the University of Florida.

UF has 1,100 graduate and undergraduate students in computer science and they are going everywhere when they graduate, many receiving multiple job offers, Gilbert said. They can be found in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, Texas and New York working for the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

But there’s also a group from Florida who would love to stay in Florida, he said.

UF graduates were not always aware of local opportunities, he said, but that’s starting to change. Local companies were invited to get involved in the now annual SwampHacks student hackathon that started last year and Gilbert said one of his goals as chairman is to build more relationships with local startup companies.

UF is also working on courses that teach the trendy programming languages that startups use on top of the usual core computer sciences and theories.

“That way we’ll have a workforce that’s better prepared to enter the startups, stay here locally and contribute,” Gilbert said.

Davenport said job candidates often look for “soft landings” — the ability to find another job in the area if one doesn’t work out.

“As we grow, we’ll start overcoming some of that,” she said of the recruiting challenges. “We need to tell our story a little louder about the assets we have. They’ll suddenly look and see a coveted place to live and work, great companies doing interesting things. It then begins to turn that tide to make it a little bit easier on the recruitment side.”

To help bridge the gap until that time, several tech entrepreneurs have started the Gainesville Dev Academy, offering boot camps to teach the coding skills needed to be job ready, as well as job placement services for more than 20 local companies.

Web development classes start Monday and in the fall the academy will add mobile development and programming 101, with classes held at several locations such as the new Infinity Hall dormitory and the Santa Fe College Center for Innovation and Economic Development, according to co-founder Duncan Kabinu, a founding member of the tech council and the Starter Space incubator.

Classes cost $7,000 each, with financing available, and include eight-week sessions for fulltime students and 12-week night classes.

The classes do not require advanced knowledge coming in, but there will be advanced courses for students with higher skill levels, Kabinu said.

“You could be a complete beginner and have enough skills to be a junior developer” after taking a class, he said.

CareerSource’s STEM Ready program offers employers another option to get new employees up to speed. Funded by a $10 million grant from the Department of Labor, the program funds paid internships for the long-term unemployed and underemployed for jobs in science, technology, engineering and math at no cost to employers in three workforce regions.

The program will start taking applications from businesses — which don’t have to be in STEM fields — in June and start placing interns in July, McKnight said.

The goal is to put 200 people into full-time jobs in the Alachua and Bradford County region, although there could be more interns, she said.

When it comes to recruiting developers, Theodore said Fracture is at more of a disadvantage in that it is one of the few startups whose founders are not also developers, as well as being a Web development startup that is also a manufacturing startup.

During Fracture’s six years of existence, the number of developers has bounced between one to three people due to the tendency of younger developers to change jobs every couple years, but Fracture needs five to eight people to fill its long-term needs, according to Theodore, who came up with Fracture’s process of printing digital photos on glass.

Now Theodore, who has had to learn web development, and two people who work remotely from Kansas City handle those duties.

“We love this town. It’s just the nature of the beast that there’s a lot of brain drain and there’s also just not an ecosystem that’s big enough to be creating a population of people,” he said.

Amir Rubin, also a founding member of the tech council, said he has had good results recruiting for his company Paracosm — which makes 3-D scanning and modeling software — whether bringing in people from UF, hiring from out town or using remote workers.

Rubin attributes that to the amount of time he spends recruiting, “easily 20 percent and sometimes up to 40 percent of my time.”

“You’re not going to have the deep pool of expertise like you do in large cities, but there are people with expertise here in Gainesville and Florida if you know where to look,” he said.

Among larger businesses, IT services company Mindtree has developed a strong pipeline from UF and Santa Fe College, and offers up to 10 weeks of training to get new hires up to speed, according to Samantha Rist, human resources manager. About 40 percent of its employees are local hires, she said.

In addition to training, the company is able to offer “top-class” health benefits, discounts at businesses and the opportunity to travel to work with clients located around the world and the chance to gain experience in a wide range of industries, Rist said.

Rubin said Gainesville is not always going to be able to compete for talent with the big cities and more established tech hubs, but for those graduates who are interested in staying and don’t want to be a “cog in this huge machine” at a large company, Gainesville has a lot to offer.

“Some of it is marketing,” he said. “They’re not necessarily even aware of the opportunities that there are in Gainesville, and some of it is, like, hey, maybe with a little more training and support and a little more awareness of the startup community, maybe you can stay in Gainesville for another year with our low-cost living and start your own company here in Gainesville and we have a community to support you and a Dev Academy to train you and make sure there’s enough talented candidates to keep your company growing.”

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